


No Better Version of Me

by Amiril



Series: Not Cover Art [9]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Fix-It, M/M, Post-Endgame, canon compliant fix it?, idk fam i wrote most of this at 3am after watching the movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-26
Updated: 2019-04-26
Packaged: 2020-02-04 18:47:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18610366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amiril/pseuds/Amiril
Summary: Steve always meant to go back.





	No Better Version of Me

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote most of this at 3am after seeing the movie, and I'm still a bit of a mess over it, so. Apologies? Here's... whatever this is.

Steve walks across an alien planet called Morag to put the Power Stone in the temple, and thinks about just how far he is from Brooklyn.

He sneaks through the golden palace of Asgard, and remembers that these halls that have stood for a thousand years are so close to their end. 

He stops in New York, while the battle wages around him. Somewhere down there on the streets is a shell-shocked Steve Rogers, two weeks out of the loss of everything he’d ever known. Clinging to order, clinging to anything that seemed familiar in a world that had spun so far away from him.

He gives the Time Stone back to be hidden away. He gives the Mind Stone to a man who is going to use it for evil, but also to give Wanda and Pietro powers that they’ll one day use for good.

He goes to Vormir, and thinks— _maybe if I don’t leave it here_ —

“It won’t bring her back,” the Red Skull says.

Clint had warned him, but it’s still jarring. To see the face of his first enemy, waiting here while Steve had been waiting in the ice. Both thought dead. Both around to—to what?

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The woman. The soul stone keeps what it is given. Time cannot change that.” Schmidt can’t smile, but he can do something with his face that Steve imagines is a sneer. It certainly isn’t pity.  

He makes himself look over the edge. Natasha had been the one to stay with him, through SHIELD and the Accords and the last five long, long years, and he owes it to her now to…

To what?

To stand here, in the last place she stood?

What will that do?

She’s dead, somewhere on the ground below, and Tony is dead in the ruins of their home, and Steve is alive on another planet unsure of what the future could possibly hold for him.

 _A man out of time,_ Loki called him once.

He throws the Soul Stone off the edge. It falls up, instead of down.

He returns to earth. To New Jersey. Puts the tesseract back where it was left, waiting for Carol’s mentor to find, for Loki to steal.

And—

And he sees Howard, at the other end of the room.

And the thing is—

Five years is a long time.

Five years in which Natasha was the only person he had left, five years when Thor had fucked off to New Asgard and Bruce to his labs and Tony to his wife and Rhodey to wherever he could find a distraction. Five years where Sam and Bucky were nothing but ashes.

Five years, and now Natasha is dead and Howard and Peggy are right here, _right here,_ and can’t he have that? Can’t he have that, even for a minute?

He won’t break reality. He’ll create a new one. The future is the past and the past is fixed, or something something something. If he goes to Peggy and just tells her that he’s alive, that he’ll be back when she’s old, then she won’t have to grieve him. Won’t be left with just that photo on her desk.

Just a hello.

So he knocks on her door, and she opens it, and—

And they hold each other and cry and he tells her, he tells her all of it, tells her what the future holds and that he’s just here for a visit, he has to get back, because—

Because—

Because Natasha is dead, and Tony is dead, and his home is a smoking crater in the ground. Just a few days here. That’s all he needs.

Just a dance.

“Tony died,” he says. “Howard’s son Tony. He was my—we were friends, some of the time. I was supposed to lead them, and—”

She doesn’t tell him it’s okay.

She knows what it means to lead.

“Dum Dum and the others are going to be over the moon,” she says, a couple days later. “And Angie, she’d love to meet you. And Howard, of course. He never really… it took him a long time to get over losing you.”

But he can’t.

He can’t because—

Because?

Captain America has been dead for twenty-five years. He only exists in grainy photos. Peggy already knows he’s alive. What’s it going to matter, if a few more people do as well?

And, God, he’s missed them.

“A robot once told me that I couldn’t live without a war,” he tells Peggy, while Dugan and Morita sleep a few off in the living room.

Peggy rolls over to look at him, face half covered by a pillow. “A robot?”

“It’s a long story. I just… I’ve been trying to figure out if he’s right.”

“I thought the war was over.”

“It is. This one is.” Bucky, Sam and Bruce are waiting for him, outside Tony’s house. “But there will be another.”

“So stay here,” she says. “If you need a war, I’ve got quite a few. Or you could stay at home and learn to cook, because I’m not good at it.”

Steve smiles at the ceiling. “That sounds nice.”

“But?”

But part of him is still standing on the cliff on Vormir, thinking about how to win you must sacrifice what you love. To stay here, he must sacrifice everything else, but—

But why?

It’s always been an either/or game. He can have the serum, the Avengers, if he gives up a life. He can have Peggy, if he gives up everyone else.

Except he’s making his own world, here.

“First I have to go to Russia.”

 

* * *

 

 

So he punches his way through the Winter Soldier base, and thinks about Sam’s movies. About leaving the other Winter Soldiers to carry out the same murders, to keep this time resembling his own. And then he thinks of Tony’s face when he saw his dad, and decides, fuck it.

He delivers half a dozen confused, traumatized assassins to Howard.

“I owe Dugan twenty dollars,” Howard says. “I was sure you’d wait another few months before charging off on your own.” He looks over their faces, eyes widening. “Is that—”

Steve smiles, and dumps a pile of files onto Howard’s desk. “Zola is still Hydra. Everyone he’s recruited is Hydra. Alexander Pierce is Hydra. These people need rooms and therapists good at undoing programming, and I’m taking Bucky home.”

It’s not as though he can call King Azzuri and say “Hey, your grandson and I are going to be friends, can you help me out?”

So he sets Bucky up in Peggy’s guest room and hopes that forty fewer years of programming means Bucky won’t feel the need to run away to Romania this time.

Eventually, he tells Steve stories of ice and snow and teenage girls trained to kill. Steve misses Natasha so much he thinks it might break him.

If he stays here, he’ll have the chance to find her again.

“Aren’t the neighbors going to talk?” Bucky asks Peggy eventually. “You, living here with two younger men, neither of whom are your husband.”

She shrugs, giving Steve a quick kiss. “No doubt. But as long as they don’t find out that one is a time traveler from 2023 and the other killed a president, I think I can handle it.”

“I’m ten years older than you now,” Steve tells Bucky in his smuggest voice.

Bucky’s eyebrow twitches.

Three weeks later, Peggy says, “Alright, if the neighbors are going to gossip anyway, you might as well share the bed, Barnes.”

Three years after that, Steve sits outside a church in Harlem. “I heard your wife was expecting,” he tells the minister. “I just wanted to offer my congratulations.”

“Thank you,” the man says, smiling politely.

Steve wants to say, _he’ll be a good man, he’ll be the best, I miss him, he doesn’t need me to make the world better because he does that all on his own—_ but Paul Wilson is already walking away, and what would be the point?

He’ll see Sam again.

He’ll tell him all of that in person. One day. He’s got Tony’s device hidden by his bed, and when the time comes, when he’s done everything here that he can, he’ll return to that timeline.  

But for now, Steve goes home to Bucky and Peggy, and he lives.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm still freaking out about Endgame on [Tumblr](https://runawaymarbles.tumblr.com/)


End file.
